Stuart Weitzman School of Design
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William (Bill) Grigsby, a former faculty member in the Weitzman School’s Department of City and Regional Planning, died on April 20. He was 94. Here, following the obituary published by the Penn Almanac on May 4, a selection of individuals who studied or worked with him reflect on his many contributions. To add your voice, contact news@design.upenn.edu.
Dr. Grigsby was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He took undergraduate courses at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, University of Kansas, and University of Colorado. Then, he received a PhD in economics from Columbia University. Dr. Grigsby served for five years in the U.S. Navy during World War II and the Korean War.
Dr. Grigsby joined the faculty of Penn’s Graduate School of Fine Arts in 1955. In 1961, he became a research associate professor of urban studies in the School of Fine Arts, a joint position with the Wharton School’s Finance Department. In 1963, he published his first book, Housing Markets and Public Policy, with Penn Press, which staked out the still-fledgling field of housing policy. Four years later, he became a professor of city planning at Penn. Dr. Grigsby also had a secondary appointment in the Institute for Urban Studies. He was active in Penn’s community, serving on several University Council and Faculty Senate committees throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including the Senate Advisory Committee, a prestigious position. In 1987 he published the book The Dynamics of Neighborhood Change and Decline, considered a definitive work in his field. In 1996, Dr. Grigsby retired from Penn and took emeritus status.
Dr. Grigsby’s research, which was recognized by his colleagues in a paper published after his retirement, was instrumental in establishing neighborhood change as a sub-field of city planning. Dr. Grigsby studied the politics of housing markets and residential segregation, the effect of poverty on neighborhoods, and steps public leaders could take to alleviate negative effects of neighborhood change. “It is very important to note that Grigsby’s contributions are so foundational to the modern field of housing economics and housing policy that many of the first-generation analysts like John Kain, John Quigley, William Wheaton, Richard Muth, and Anthony Downs do not bother to cite his works,” said his colleagues in their paper in celebration of him. “Grisby’s contributions have become ingrained in the core of housing policy.”
Dr. Grigsby was predeceased by his wife, Esther (née Olson). He is survived by his daughters, Anne Lanshe (Timothy), Laurie de Linde (Jorn), Sioux Xenakis, Karen Grigsby, and Astrid Dee Bennett (Joseph); seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Megbolugbe is a former student, research and teaching assistant and friend of Professor Grigsby and retired faculty at the Johns Hopkins University.
Learning from the Best
I learned positively and immeasurably from Professor William G. Grigsby. He was one of the classic archetypes in the field of urban studies and city planning in the twentieth century. He was both a pioneer, chronicler, and a visionary thinker who invented much of the vocabulary that first generation analysts like John Kain, John Quigley, William Wheaton, Richard Muth, Anthony Downs and even Britton Harris employed to discuss the study of cities, neighborhoods, and housing markets.
Professor Grigsby was no disrespecter of persons. He related to people, both students and colleagues, with kindness, compassion, and soberness. He was a true intellectual. He considered ideas with a combination of Socratic fervor, intellectual transparency, and tremendous epistemic humility. Professor Grigsby treated research as an important service to policy with discovery and fidelity with evidence-based decision making. Overall, he believed that planning practice should surrender to social justice imagination but disciplined by the distribution of justice analytics that are now becoming institutionalized in contextualized planning practice. He was one of the foremost prescient scholars in urban analytics of the twentieth century.
I appreciate how broad-minded Professor Grigsby was. He had an uncanny ability to consider perspectives from other people and demonstrated empathetic sensibilities without compromising or surrendering his views, perspectives, and objections. I never realized he had changed his belief about the nature of market outcomes given the significant role of social construction of markets and related institutions until later in his life during a casual conversation about a policy issue during the Trump Administration. On reflection, the many discussion sessions and informal debates with Professor Grigsby felt like a masterclass in how to think, expose your thoughts to your own intelligence through a critical inquiring mind. It took a while, but I eventually understood why he talked slowly, deliberately, carefully, and with tremendous amount of tentativeness. His clarity and simplicity in both writing and talking belied the complexities, contradictions, and heterogeneity of issues, concerns, and realities he often simultaneously conceptualized and operationalized.
Remembering William G Grigsby (1927-2021), Mentor/Some-Time Colleague/Long-Time Friend
Some Vital Statistics
William G. Grigsby received his B.S. degree from the University of Colorado in 1948, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1950 and 1958 respectively. His unpublished doctoral dissertation was titled The Residential Real Estate Market in an Area Undergoing Racial Transition. His position at the University of Pennsylvania was somewhat complicated. He was appointed to the faculties of the Department of City and Regional Planning in the School of Fine Arts and the Finance Department of the Wharton School. Grigsby was also a member of the staff of the Institute of Urban Studies.
Bill Grigsby’s Contributions in Context
Bill Grigsby was part of a lively and talented group of educationists/practitioners who joined the teaching and research staff of Penn’s Department of City Planning during the late 1950s and early 1960s. At this time, it was difficult to build an academic career in one of the mainstream disciplines on the strength of expertise in “urbanism”. Despite mounting evidence of significant urban problems, in-depth investigations of urban phenomena were generally regarded as “unfashionable” in academic circles. The various members of the Penn contingent were in a sense ahead of their time; over the next decade it became apparent that the mainstream academic disciplines could no longer ignore the urban policy agenda.
Some members of this talented contingent were trained in architecture; others had a background in law or one of the social sciences. Their diverse interests and experiences served to create a platform for a stimulating and sometimes frustrating learning environment. Among those who were actively involved in teaching and research at this time were Paul Davidoff, Herbert Gans, Britton Harris, Ibrahim Jammal, Grace Milgram, Robert B Mitchell, Paul Niebanck, Chester Rapkin, Denise Scott Brown, Ann Louise Strong, David A Wallace, and William L C Wheaton. Along with the personal efforts of Bill Grigsby, the work of Grace Milgram, Paul Niebanck, Chet Rapkin, and Dave Wallace often focused upon issues relating to housing policy and urban renewal.
Chet Rapkin and Bill Grigsby were trained in economics. Both received their doctoral degrees from Columbia University. Prior to taking up posts at Penn, they were based at Columbia’s Institute for Urban Land Use and Housing Studies. This Institute was first established in 1948 under the direction of Ernest M Fisher (1893-1981). Bill Grigsby was an ardent admirer of Ernest Fisher’s work, and he regarded Fisher as his mentor. Interestingly, there was also a link between Fisher and the renowned economist Richard T. Ely (1854-1943). Prior to Fisher’s appointment to a teaching post at Columbia University in 1945, he had been based at the University of Michigan from 1926 to 1936. During this period, he was strongly influenced by the work of Richard Ely who at this time held a Chair in Economics at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Enduring Legacy of Ernest Fisher
Throughout his career, Bill Grigsby respected and applied the wisdom of Ernest Fisher’s approach to the understanding of housing markets. In Fisher’s view, housing markets were ineluctably local and regional in nature. Any notions about the existence of national or global housing markets were regarded as counter-productive, even mythical, in Fisher’s terms.
A detailed understanding of local and regional conditions was seen to be a fundamental pre-requisite for the development of effective policy measures. The potential success of public interventions was largely dependent upon a clear understanding of the problems they were meant to solve, and the new problems that might be generated.
Bill Grigsby was well placed to build on the legacy of his mentor Ernest Fisher. He was blessed with an inquiring, analytical mind and a strong empirical orientation. These qualities are readily apparent in the body of work he produced throughout his career.
Making of a Housing Classic
Over the years Bill Grigsby produced an impressive array of publications, usually in collaboration with other colleagues. By far his most important single author publication was a major book titled Housing Markets and Public Policy, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1963. This study examined the structure and operation of housing markets with particular reference to the problems of maintaining adequate levels of new construction, improving housing standards, and renewing or eliminating decayed portions of the residential inventory.
According to William L C Wheaton, who was director of the Institute for Urban Studies at the time of publication, Housing Markets and Public Policy was one of the first major attempts to analyse the relationships between the private housing market and public renewal initiatives. The analytical rigour of Grigsby’s work made the book an important contribution to improved understanding of the relationships between market processes and public aids and controls. For scholars in the field who maintain an interest in the development of the housing literature, Housing Markets and Public Policy has long been regarded as a housing classic.
Other 1960s/1970s Publications of Note
At the turn of the 1960s Bill Grigsby and Chester Rapkin collaborated on several ground-breaking studies. Three jointly authored publications appeared in 1960: Demand for Housing in Racially Mixed Areas, Residential Renewal in the Urban Core, and Demand for Housing in Eastwick.
Demand for Housing in Racially Mixed Areas was essentially an extended and updated version of Grigsby’s doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. The book was published under the umbrella of the Commission for Racial Equality.
Residential Renewal in the Urban Core and Demand for Housing in Eastwick were commissioned by the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia and produced under the umbrella of the Institute for Urban Studies. Both of these reports were a reflection of the authors’ concerns about the need for neighbourhood level analyses. At the time of writing, most of the work on local housing needs had been undertaken on a city or metropolitan area basis. Very little work had been undertaken on what Rapkin and Grigsby regarded as the more difficult problem of analysing the market in smaller areas. These reports also set a standard for consultancy work relating to housing and urban renewal and helped to promote a more fruitful relationship between “Town” and “Gown” in the Philadelphia area.
In 1975, Bill Grigsby produced a book titled Urban Housing Policy in collaboration with junior author Louis Rosenburg. This work focused primarily on the relationship of housing problems to poverty using Baltimore, Maryland as a case study. It was the outgrowth of a larger inquiry funded mainly by the Office of Economic Opportunity.
The policy recommendations of Urban Housing Policy stressed the need for more serious consideration of modest rehabilitation to conserve resources and preserve the inner-city stock that remains salvageable, and the promotion of new mechanisms to facilitate transfers of ownership from existing private landlords to either potential owner-occupiers or an organisation that was capable of providing sound management. The possibility of creating non-profit community-based organisations to take over existing stock was raised but not explored in any depth.
Sabbatical Leave in Scotland
At the invitation of the University of Glasgow, Bill and Esther Grigsby spent several periods of sabbatical leave in Scotland during the late 1970s and early 1980s. For Bill, part of the fascination of being based in Glasgow was that it gave him at opportunity to observe at first hand the tenement improvement work that was under way in inner-city working-class neighbourhoods.
The periods for Bill’s sabbatical leave happened to coincide with the formative years of the community-based housing association movement in the West of Scotland. A proper administrative framework for transfers of ownership was created, the standard of rehabilitation was high rather than moderate, the available subsidies were generous, the opportunities for resident participation were genuine, and the physical conditions in many parts of the inner-city were being transformed. There was much to learn from the Glasgow experience of those heady days.
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